British Politics and Policy at LSEhttps://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy
Experts analyse and debate recent developments across UK government, politics and policyFri, 24 May 2019 07:39:06 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.10https://blogsmedia.lse.ac.uk/blogs.dir/8/files/2019/02/cropped-favicon-32x32.jpgBritish Politics and Policy at LSEhttps://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy
3232http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/158767244EU migrants contribute to UK public finances, but the money hasn’t gone where it’s neededhttps://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/migration-funding-distribution/
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/migration-funding-distribution/#respondFri, 24 May 2019 07:39:06 +0000https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/?p=67304

While migrants’ fiscal contributions could make up for the increased demand on public services, these are currently being used for other purposes, writes Johnny Runge. As a result many people continue to assume that migration is a drain to the economy and to public services.

EU migrants contribute positively to UK public finances. According to recent research, they pay more into the system through taxes than what they take out by using public services and receiving benefits. Furthermore, EU migrants’ contributions over their entire lifetime are usually much higher than those of natives, partly because most migrants arrive fully educated and many leave before the cost of retirement and old-age starts to weigh on public finances.

Still, the public’s opposition to EU migration is driven, in large part, by economic factors, often focused on migrants’ use of state funds, welfare and public services such as the NHS and schools. While the British public has become increasingly positive about the overall economic impact of EU immigration since the EU referendum in 2016, the same opinion polls still show that a substantial part of the population think migration has had a negative economic impact.

Another explanation would be that parts of the public are simply ignorant of EU immigrants’ positive impact on public finances, or that their judgement is biased by other considerations. For example, those who oppose immigration for cultural reasons may simply be choosing to ignore or reject the economic facts. But it’s also possible that the public are simply looking at the issue from a different perspective, and that this is view is as informative as the perspective of experts.

So, what have their personal experiences been? The rise in net EU migration since 2004 has coincided with an economic downturn, followed by a decade of austerity including deterioration of public services and cuts to welfare. Quite understandably, parts of the public have connected this rise in net migration with their perception that living standards have declined.

Of course, experts would take care not to mistake correlation for causation. They would argue that any deterioration in living standards has resulted from recession and government austerity policies rather than the impact of EU migration. But even if the public’s economic concerns about EU migration are not statistically bullet-proof, the reality is that the government has neglected to respond to population increases, which have resulted in part from higher net EU immigration.

The fact that migrants’ fiscal contributions could, in principle, make up for the increased demand on public services ‘is not so much comfort in practice if those revenues are in fact being allocated elsewhere, for tax cuts or deficit reduction, as in fact has been the case,’ argues Professor Jonathan Portes.

The Migration Advisory Committee, an independent body that advices the government on migration issues, recognised this back in 2012. In a much overlooked part of their recent report, written to inform future immigration policy, they explore whether the allocation of public funding has allowed money to flow to areas where migration has increased the demand for public services.

They found that migration only makes a few direct appearances in the funding formulae, including by adjusting school funding to take account of numbers of pupils who speak English as an Additional Language. They concluded that the existing funding formulas are ‘very complicated’ and that ‘…we are not convinced sufficient attention is paid to [this issue].’

Faced with this absence of information on how national funds find their way to parts of the UK, people are understandably sceptical about statements that migrants put more into the economy than they take out. Instead, they rely on personal judgements. As our NIESR research found, conveying evidence on the fiscal contribution of migrants with a ‘produced by experts’ label lacks appeal compared to a simpler explanation based on personal experiences.

The design of a new, post-Brexit immigration system is an opportunity to address public concerns, yet the White Paper proposals contain no considerations about how migration funding is distributed. Given the role of immigration in the Leave vote and the tensions it exposed, it is crucial to address the widespread assumption that migration is a drain to the economy and to public services rather than a benefit. Otherwise, the public and experts will keep talking at cross-purposes on the impacts of immigration.

All articles posted on this blog give the views of the author(s), and not the position of LSE British Politics and Policy, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science. Featured image: Pixabay (Public Domain).

]]>https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/migration-funding-distribution/feed/067304Why reading polls is actually a lot more complicated than it lookshttps://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/ep2019-polls/
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/ep2019-polls/#respondThu, 23 May 2019 14:16:50 +0000https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/?p=67287

When the results of the European Parliament elections are revealed they will likely be met with the usual assortment of self-congratulation and outcry. Drawing on the work of the LSE Electoral Psychology Observatory, Michael Bruter and Sarah Harrison explain why polling is a lot more complicated than people may think.

Reading polls is a lot more complicated than what many assume and often, we blame polls for our own misunderstanding of what they can and cannot tell us and of the nature of citizens’ psychology. As British people vote for the European Parliament Elections, here are seven points that might be of interest to those who care about polls and elections.

Over 90% of our political thinking and behaviour is actually subconscious

You can ask someone what they think or what they will do, but the truth is that they do not know it themselves. So, whilst a person’s answer to the question ‘who will you vote for on Thursday’ is useful and consequential, it is not so in a ‘what they say is what they will do’ sort of way. This impact of the subconscious has been well studied, and scholars are aware of it, but sometimes we do not fully realise its impact of the relationship between what we ask and what people can answer.

Moreover, the consequences of the subconscious nature of political behaviour can be harder to evaluate in the age of de-aligned politics. Whilst everyone realises that party identification has declined, the prevalence of ‘old’ models of identification means that we implicitly assume that such identification is the sole source of consistency in electoral behaviour, and that therefore, electoral unfaithfulness or populism are incoherent or anomalous.

The truth is that there can be many other sources of consistency in electoral behaviour which are not based on constant party choices. One may choose to vote for Labour when the Tories are in power for exactly the same reason they chose to vote Tory when Labour was in power. This can be perfectly coherent and predictable, just not in a simplistic partisan framework, but instead based on our understanding of how different voters perceive the function of elections and their own role as voters – what we call their electoral identity.

(Most) people vote on Election Day for a reason

Our research suggests that between 20-30% of voters typically make up or change their minds within a week of an election, about half of them (10-15%) on Election Day. In low salience elections – such as European Parliament elections – this can be even more.

We find that the atmosphere of elections typically picks up radically in the final week and also that voters are far more sociotropic when they vote at a polling station than when they answer survey questions or vote from home. Usually, a lot of those late deciders and switchers cancel each other out, but sometimes this is not the case (e.g. second round of the French 2017 election) and individual conversions can then add up to a change in the election result.

Pollsters make assumptions about what they are getting wrong

Your favourite pollster does not just ask people who they will vote for and print the result. Poll results would look very different if they did. Instead, they use past experience and make assumptions on what they must change to correct what they believe is the gap between measured responses and actual picture.

For instance, if for the past three years, a survey company underestimated the country’s extreme right vote, they will assume that their current measure similarly undercounts those voters and they will “correct” the responses they get by using weightings (i.e. multiplying the declared vote for the extreme right by a small or sometimes not-so-small factor) to try and reach a more realistic figure. Those assumptions and corrections may make the results more accurate… or less.

Pollsters make assumptions about who will vote

Pollsters also make assumptions over turnout. What’s the point of taking that into account a respondent’s answer on who they will vote for if they stay home? When you expect a high turnout of say 80%, those assumptions are fairly robust, but the lower the expected turnout, the more fragile the guesswork is – European Parliament elections tend to have a low turnout so fall squarely within that category.

Often, survey companies will use questions such as ‘how sure are you to vote?’ to predict turnout, but our research suggests that those questions are not very efficient. So, many of the differences across polls are partly due to different pollsters making different assumptions on which respondent categories will or won’t vote, something many got wrong in 2017 about young people.

Furthermore, while analysing the EU membership referendum and the 2017 snap election, we pointed out that most polls and surveys do not use actual measures of turnout, because they count proportions of voters out of total respondents, whilst turnout is a proportion of voters out of registered voters. However, we know that those aged 20-25 are far less likely to be registered than any other category. So in a poll, when a 20-year-old tells you that they won’t vote, you count them as an abstentionist whilst they may just be unregistered.

Because of what we explained above about weightings (surveys chronically have too many people claiming to vote), mistaking unregistered youngsters for absentionists will then make you disproportionately overestimate the presence of abstentionists amongst young people.

Institutional designs matter

Electorates are not monolithic, and national trends do not count as much as what happens within each constituency. For instance, Labour was more affected than the Conservatives by the rise of the UKIP vote in the 2015 General Election notably in some Northern constituencies, and benefited more from its decline in 2017.

With the 2019 European Parliament elections, things are further complicated by the d’Hondt method which implies different calculations for strategic voters than under the plurality used in General Elections. Under plurality, it is quite easy to be strategic: avoid small parties. Under the d’Hondt method, things are far more complex. Often, voting for a strong list means a wasted vote whilst supporting a smaller list will give them a seat. Thus, the ‘remain voter’ website designed by data scientists has come up with suggestions for remainers to vote for the Lib Dems in Scotland and Wales, the Greens in the North West and the Midlands, and for Change UK in London and the South East. Even then, those predictions still rely on the polls so may be exactly right or not at all.

Polls do not just measure voting intentions, they shape them

One of the important concepts in our research is the concept of ‘societal projection’. Many voters think of the rest of the country and its behaviour as they cast their vote. Of course, opinion polls play a big part in shaping what we all believe others are doing. In other words, polls precede the vote and can thus affect it.

Thus, we believe that part of the explanation to the apparent ‘surprise’ of the 2015 General Election which saw the Tories win a straight majority after all polls seemed to predict a hung Parliament is that precisely due to those expectations, many voters cast their ballot thinking that they were effectively shaping the type of coalition that could lead the country rather than giving a party a majority.

In an era of transparency, it is actually good that all citizens have equal access to polling information rather than those being secretly collected by parties or governments. However, this creates an endogeneity problem: polls do not just measure something with no ensuing consequence; instead, they become one of the prime sources of information that voters use to make up their minds.

Should we just get rid of polls altogether?

Nobody would suggest that we should stop having chemistry experiments just because not everyone can just immediately interpret their result or self-teach how to be effective chemists on the internet. Survey research is the same: a complex body of knowledge which design, analysis, and interpretation require complex knowledge, and literacy. It also requires sufficient introspection to know the limits and conditions of the exercise.

At the Electoral Psychology Observatory, when we thought that Leave and Trump may well win at the times most polls seemed to suggest Remain and Clinton victories, it is because we asked ourselves questions like’“are the people who should vote Clinton say that they will?’ and ‘are claimed leave and remain supporters equally enthusiastic or do they say that they will choose the lesser of two evils?’. The picture that emerged was very different from the misleading headline figure most media focused on.

Voters not doing what they said they intended to does not make polls wrong. Instead, we are blaming polls for our own collective lack of understanding of how we should read them, and of the psychology of voters, human beings who react to all information including polls, and who can and will change their minds till the last minute especially when they feel the responsibility of their role as a voter on their shoulders. Indeed, anyone who has ever been to a polling station knows that this is not a meaningless moment. There are a whole range of thoughts, memories, and emotions that come to our mind as we stand in the polling booth which we could not expect until we are reminded of the role that we inhabit as a voter. That we should behave differently in those circumstances than when we answered a random interviewer about our voting intention does not make the interviewer wrong, instead it proves the whole logic of electoral democracy right.

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Note: you can follow the work of the Electoral Psychology Observatory here.

About the Authors

Michael Bruter is Professor of Political Science and European Politics in the Department of Government at the LSE, and Director of the Electoral Psychology Observatory.

Sarah Harrison is Assistant Professorial Research Fellow in Political Science in the Department of Government at the LSE, and Deputy Director of the Electoral Psychology Observatory.

All articles posted on this blog give the views of the author(s), and not the position of LSE British Politics and Policy, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.Featured image credit: Pixabay (Public Domain).

Katharine Dommett and Luke Temple discuss the potential for expert-inspired reforms to boost citizens’ satisfaction with parties. They provide evidence that a perceived lack of expert engagement in parties predicts citizen dissatisfaction, and explain the traits that define the appeal of expertise.

Frequently described as unrepresentative, undemocratic, self-interested and divided, it is well established that the public – in the UK and other western democracies – are far from satisfied with political parties. Less clear is how, if at all, parties might be changed to improve citizens’ views. Whilst creating supporter networks and opening up channels of participation has been a common response, we explore the role that might be played by greater engagement with experts to help improve public perceptions. This might seem counter-intuitive in an age of populist scepticism towards elites, but we find a broadly positive link between views on expert engagement in parties and satisfaction with parties. However, further data from deliberative workshops with both activists and the public demonstrates that this general trend hides complications and contradictions in public opinion. This means that parties face multiple challenges if trying to realise citizens’ desires for expert engagement.

The position of experts has been the subject of increasing debate in recent years. Whilst some have claimed the public have had enough of experts, there is in fact evidence that people are attracted to the idea of experts playing a role in politics. Indeed, a prominent study from the US found that:

‘People would most prefer decisions to be made by what we call empathetic, non-self-interested decision makers…The people are surprisingly smitten with the notion of elite experts making choices.’

Considering this possibility in the UK, we set out to examine citizens’ views of experts and expertise in the context of political parties. We examined public views through a nationally representative survey fielded by YouGov and three deliberative workshops. Supporting previous studies of expertise, we found that people have positive views. When asking how often parties should ideally think about the opinion of different groups we found that 50% of respondents wanted experts to be thought about more than half the time. This group statistically out-performed potential voters (43%) and party members (39%). But it was not the only favoured group as 65% of respondents also wanted the majority of the public to be considered.

We then asked how often parties actually thought about these groups and, by looking at the gap between questions, found that 56% of people felt that parties listened to experts less than they would wish. Using regression modelling we examined if these attitudes towards who should be listened to might be associated with satisfaction with political parties (further accounting for party support, strength of partisanship, left-right ideology, age, gender, education, class and attention to politics).

Our results show that in comparison to those who think experts are listened to the desired amount, there is evidence that those who think experts are listened to more than desired (b=-0.43, p<0.1) and those who think experts are less than desired (b=0-52, p<0.05) are significantly less likely to be satisfied with parties. Therefore, listening to experts matters, and on this basis, there appears to be a case for parties to think more about expertise.

And yet, in reaching this conclusion, it is important to think further about what this finding means in practice. Whilst notions of expertise and expert engagement can feel intuitive, findings from Science and Technology Studies show that people in fact have very different understandings of these ideas. For this reason, we used deliberative workshops to unpack citizens’ ideas and identified three important elements that relate to the role of the expert; who counts as an expert; and expert status and partisan affiliation.

First, when talking about their desires for experts and expertise, workshop participants showed that they had important preferences for the role of experts. Whilst people were comfortable with the idea of experts informing parties and aiding the formulation of policies and decisions, many had concerns about experts being given any power to make decisions.

Second, different participants felt that different people counted as experts. Although there was a widespread and instinctive belief that experts are people with qualifications or professional knowledge, some people – although only after a period of discussion – also argued that people could be experts on the basis of personal and lived experience. For instance, discussing expertise in healthcare, one participant noted ‘if you’re a carer say, then let’s speak to her and get her views on what it is like to be a carer’. Or, as a participant put it more generally, ‘If we go with academics you can potentially know how an aircraft carrier works, but do they know how to drive it?’.

Finally, we also found that the partisan status of experts mattered. Some people wanted experts to be ‘neutral’ and ‘value-free’ actors who gave advice to all parties; yet others wanted experts who only gave advice to parties they agreed with. The weight of support generally fell in favour of more neutral, independent actors, reflecting a commonly-held belief that values should have no influence over the reasoning of scientists. However, our participants acknowledged that parties would interpret even ‘neutral’ evidence in a partisan way, as the following exchange between participants highlights:

‘I think isn’t there also interpretation of the evidence, because I can present technical evidence to the Tory Party and the Labour Party but they will interpret it in different ways?’

‘Presumably because they don’t have enough expert advice for us to peer review it?’

‘No, it is because it is ideological – you see what you want to see because of what you believe.’

Looking at these three points, it appears that people have complex desires for parties and appear to favour a certain form of expertise.

In thinking about the implications of this finding for parties, it is also important to question the reliability of public views. Many parties already draw on expertise. Indeed, there have been relatively high-profile examples such as Labour’s creation of an expert panel to advise on economic policy (although, this initiative seemed to run aground relatively quickly). Even amongst the better-informed activists, few workshop participants knew that parties already used expertise. This suggests that public views may not be the most informed, raising questions about the degree to which parties will want to act on the basis of these ideas.

In summary, we find that whilst experts have appeal, they are not a panacea for parties’ troubles. Even if parties can navigate citizens’ specific and complex desires, recent examples suggest that there is no guarantee that these activities will even be noticed, let alone improve perceptions.

_______________

Note: the above draws on the authors’ published work in Political Studies.

About the Authors

Katharine Dommett (@KateDommett) is Senior Lecturer at the University of Sheffield and Director of the Crick Centre for the Public Understanding of Politics.

In the protracted aftermath of the 2016 Brexit vote, more than 4.1 million UK citizens signed a petition in early 2019 calling for a second referendum on EU membership. This time they wanted it to be based on new rules in terms of the scale of majority (60%) and the turnout (75%) required to act on the result. Their hopes faded away when the government responded that the decision made in the 2016 referendum ‘must be respected’.

Existing studies in political science suggest that post-electoral reactions by voters are mainly outcome-driven. These accounts consider winners and losers as homogeneous groups; and they neglect the individual-level profile and motivations of ‘graceful losers’. Using an innovative and direct question to measure consent by voters on the losing side, our research finds that their reaction to the outcome is also process-driven.

We have three key findings. First, using opinion survey data collected right after the referendum, our research shows the importance of distinguishing between ‘graceful’ and ‘sore’ losers for a better understanding of the crucial phenomenon of losers’ consent. Using a direct question to measure this, Table 1 demonstrates that there are three key groups after an election (not two). Voters on the winning side are overwhelmingly satisfied with the result, but then there are the losers who refuse to recognize the legitimacy of the outcome; and ‘graceful losers’, who accept that appropriate procedural rules have been complied with.

Table 1:Winning and democratic majorities in the 2016 referendum on British membership of the European Union.

Notes: The ‘vote’ column represents the official results (rounded) of the 2016 referendum. The legitimacy question reads as follow: “Do you think that the government should accept the result of the referendum and that the UK should leave the European Union or do you think that the government should not accept the result of the referendum and that a second referendum should be held on this question?”. Source: Survey of 1514 respondents. Fieldwork: 1-5 July 2016. See full article for more information.

Second, our research confirms that these patterns hold when we rely on a less direct but more commonly used variable to measure voters’ acceptance of the result: respondents’ level of satisfaction with democracy. Grouping respondents into two homogeneous blocks, winners and losers, leads to the usual conclusion that satisfaction with democracy is higher among winners (52%) than among losers (45%). However, the level of satisfaction with democracy among ‘graceful losers’ (57%) is not smaller, but in fact slightly higher than that amongst voters on the winning side. By contrast, only 37% of ‘sore’ losers are satisfied with democracy. This 20-point gap for the same variable (57% vs. 37%) between the two groups of losing-side voters is striking. ‘Graceful’ or accepting losing voters are a group that adds to the democratic majority, and provides greater legitimacy to a given political outcome.

Third, our research examines and compares the distinct attitudinal profiles of these two groups of losers. Table 2 demonstrates that the consent of graceful losers depends on a balance between their emotions, holding moderate opinions, and political sophistication.

The results in column 1 are based on the contrast between winners and ‘sore’ losers whereas those in column 2 compare ‘graceful’ and ‘sore’ losers. They indicate that socioeconomic variables are not very useful in discriminating between our three groups of voters. The results in column 2 offer interesting indications of the reasons why ‘graceful’ losers were more willing than the rest of Remainers to accept the referendum outcome. The positive sign of the ‘Happy (to leave)’ variable suggests that ‘graceful’ losers’ reacted to their defeat in a less emotionally intense way than did ‘sore’ losers. Furthermore, the significant result for the Information (about the EU) variable suggests that ‘graceful’ losers’ higher level of sophistication makes them more likely to use democratic principles to form their view of the referendum outcome’s legitimacy – which made them more likely to accept their side’s defeat.

The last three variables in table 2 show that ‘graceful’ losers were driven by contradictory feelings when faced with the options on the table. In a more moderate way than winners, the ‘graceful’ losers saw the EU as too centralized, were more attached to the UK than to the EU and made up their minds relatively late in the Brexit campaign. These variables may be interpreted as reflecting the state of mind of “cross-pressured voters”, who are either ambivalent about the different options or simply have a moderate opinion about the issue of EU membership. The positive coefficient for the variables measuring attachment and EU centralization variables signal that ‘graceful’ losers were less in favour of the EU and more prone to think that it decides too many issues than were ‘sore’ losers. Holding mixed and moderate views about Britain’s EU membership may also explain why ‘graceful’ losers made up their minds how to vote later than ‘sore’ losers did.

Overall, these findings suggest that ‘graceful’ losers over Brexit were politically involved and principled citizens who were more inclined to judge the merits of democracy in procedural terms. In our study they were also more politically sophisticated, less emotionally engaged in the electoral decision, held more moderate views on the object of the vote, and were undecided between the options until the end of the campaign.

These findings have some important implications for democratic theory. Our picture of the equilibrium between emotion and reason buttresses the conventional image of the ideal citizen: informed, sophisticated, committed, and able to overcome their frustrations after a defeat. However, the findings suggest that the stability of democracies may also depend on other groups of voters rarely celebrated by analysts – namely some of the late deciders and those voters torn between contradicting considerations. These two groups have a reputation for being less politically educated and deciding how to vote in emotional or expressive ways. We suggest that the ‘graceful’ losers amongst them are an indispensable component of the democratic majority in the aftermath of an electoral campaign, and that they contribute to the stability of democratic regimes.

All articles posted on this blog give the views of the author(s), and not the position of LSE British Politics and Policy, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.Featured image credit: Pixabay (Public Domain).

Daniel Fitzpatrick and Dave Richards examine the patterns of gender representation in the UK Civil Service under the coalition government. They explain why there was a regressive change in the most senior grades and highlight the role of ‘critical feminist actors’ in driving forward gender equality and diversity agendas in Whitehall.

The equal representation of women and men in positions of political power continues to prove elusive. Institutions – including political parties, business, and the media – are criticised for the slow, incremental nature of change. Progress towards the goal of gender parity seems to move at a snail’s pace. But what happens when gender parity is achieved? This is a question we explore in a new article for British Politics examining the patterns of gender representation in the UK Civil Service under the coalition government (2010–2015). In it, we interrogate the claim that there was a regressive change in the proportion of women in the most senior grades of Whitehall during this period.

2011 can be identified as a notable date in which gender parity in the most senior grade of permanent secretary in Whitehall was attained for the first time. It represented a hugely symbolic moment, emboldening the then Cabinet Secretary, Gus O’Donnell to declare that the Civil Service had become a ‘genuinely meritocratic’ organisation.

Fast-forward to the end of the Coalition and the claim that meritocracy—free of bias (conscious or otherwise)—as the new norm appeared somewhat premature. The headline figure showed that women accounted for more than half of all UK civil servants (at 53.5%). Yet, a more nuanced examination revealed that the most senior policy roles in Whitehall remained predominantly the preserve of white, middle-class men, with only 38.7% of women working in the top four pay bands. At the highest grade of permanent secretary, the earlier gender parity achieved in 2011 had vanished by 2013, with only four of the 16 permanent secretaries being women, rising to six by that Government’s end.

What is most notable under the Coalition is the gendered dimension to recruitment at the most senior levels. Women make up more than half of the civil service. For the senior civil service in 2015, the figure was 38.7%, rising above the putative ‘tipping point’ of 40% in 2016. Yet, despite this, the qualitative evidence suggests the culture and practices of the senior civil service were far from being ‘feminised’.

A series of high-profile, ‘early’ departures saw several female Permanent Secretaries (including Helen Ghosh, Moira Wallace and Gillian Morgan from their respective leadership of the Home Office, Department of Energy and Climate Change and the Welsh Government) being replaced by men. This reinforced the perception that the appointment of women at the highest grades remained an issue.

What the aggregate data on the Coalition years reveals is an increase in the proportion of women in all grades of the civil service, except the Top 200 group. The contrast in these two sets of figures raises questions over established ‘critical mass’ approaches. The traditional argument suggests that once critical mass is reached, the previously under-represented group becomes more ‘socially prominent’ in the organisation. The point at which critical mass of women in an organisation is reached is portrayed as a step-change for its culture and working practices. Research by Kanter (1977), for example, argues that women must account for at least 40% of an organisation, if there is likely to be any impact upon institutional culture, norms and values.

Our research supports previous empirical studies that question an assumed relationship between ‘sheer’ numbers of women and discernible changes in outcomes and organisational cultures. Part of the explanation points to the absence of a critical mass of women at the top—permanent secretary and director-general level—with the evidence above revealing it flat-lined to around 25% during the Coalition period.

Bringing in the role of the critical feminist actor

In Westminster-style democracies, power and resources tend to be concentrated within a small group of actors. There is a need to focus on the currently under-explored role played by departments and more specifically senior civil servants, as critical feminist actors. Those officials operating within the Top 200 have considerable discretion over the direction of their departments and also have significant managerial autonomy to represent women actively within and across the civil service.

What this suggests is that in striving to achieve gender diversity, we must also pay heed to the relational role that individuals and structures play in maintaining as well as reaching important milestones in representative bureaucracy, so that these are not merely symbolic victories.

_____________

Note: the above draws on the authors’ published work in British Politics.

About the Authors

Daniel Fitzpatrick is a Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at Aston University.

Dave Richards is Professor of Public Policy and Head of Department at the University of Manchester.

All articles posted on this blog give the views of the author(s), and not the position of LSE British Politics and Policy, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.Featured image credit: Pixabay (Public Domain).

In An Anthropology of Marxism, reissued posthumously, Cedric J. Robinson provides a novel lens for deconstructing the work of Karl Marx by challenging Marx’s assertion that capitalism is an essential precondition for socialism. Robinson’s account holds great potential as a tool of political praxis, writes Eric Loefflad, and its critique of Marxism offers a new dimension of Marxist strategy for today’s world.

An Anthropology of Marxism. Cedric J. Robinson. Pluto Press. 2019.

In the decade following the 2008 financial crisis, global inequality is rising, climate disaster is impending and far-right authoritarianism is enjoying one political victory after another. As existing institutional logics fail to explain, let alone rectify, these situations, it is unsurprising that Karl Marx’s critique of capitalism, long marginalised after the fall of the Soviet Union, is experiencing a resurgence. However, this renewed Marxist interest is accompanied by claims that Marxism is prone to rigidity/exclusionism in its theory of universal emancipation. Diverse in its manifestations, this line of critique has portrayed the Marxist tradition as flawed in its primary location of transformative agency in a predominantly white male industrial working class whose exploitation is facilitated by their status as formally equal agents. What is lost in this account is capitalism’s reliance on inequality-based structures that include: the uncompensated labour of women in the domestic sphere, racialised colonial dispossession and the coerced extraction of value from slaves, serfs and peasants.

Against this backdrop, Cedric J. Robinson’s An Anthropology of Marxism (hereinafter ‘Anthropology’) provides a novel lens for deconstructing the work of Marx and the critiques lodged against it. Reissued from its original 2001 edition with a foreword from HLT Quan and a preface by Avery Gordon, the central argument of the now deceased Robinson is that Marx was incorrect in his assertion that capitalism is an essential precondition for socialism. Here he frames Marx’s theoretical synthesis of German philosophy, English political economy and the French revolutionary legacy as failing to interrogate its own cultural and intellectual presumptions. Rather, by rejecting pre-Enlightenment emancipatory endeavours as inconsequential instances of ‘primitive socialism’, Marx embraced the very conceits of bourgeois ideology he purported to critique.

From this premise, Robinson offers an alternative genealogy of socialism by turning to eleventh-, twelfth- and thirteenth-century Europe. According to this narrative, peasant uprisings against the power of merchants, feudal lords and the hierarchy of the Catholic Church were driven by interpretations of Christianity that, in varying form, called for radical distributional and gender equality. This foundational eruption of socialism prompted the existing order to suppress these efforts through a reconfiguration of previously pluralistic Christian doctrines that labelled these popular movements as ‘heretical’. Yet, despite this concerted suppression, a formative socialism lived on through religious orders such as the Franciscans, and later the Jesuits, who attained influence as dispute resolvers and charity-providers throughout Europe and later its overseas colonies.

From here, Robinson shows how the legacies of formative socialism shaped the thought of both Immanuel Kant and Georg Hegel, yet were excluded from Marx’s depiction of these theorists. Following this, Anthropology turns to Marx’s usage of Aristotle. Here Robinson claims that Aristotle’s conception of a political society of formally equal citizens, and its erasure of women and slaves, is reproduced in Marx’s conception of proletariat agency and its emphasis on formal equality as constitutive of capitalist social relations. For Robinson, this exclusion of medieval socialist formulations that centred the plight of formally unequal subjects was symptomatic of Marx’s investment in bourgeois Enlightenment conceptions of linear progress through rationality. Thus, under Marx’s influence:

the originated discourse in Western socialism became subjugated knowledges. In their place socialism acquired an alternative and secularized natural history, one drawn from the discursive practices of scientific discourse and bourgeois hagiography (111).

In evaluating Robinson’s argument, we must understand the intervention he was making in the context of Anthropology’s original 2001 publication. As Quan notes in the foreword, Robinson can be read as a response to the anti-socialist ethos of the post-Cold War era that purported to discard Marxism into the world-historic repository of failed ideas. Thus, in continuing the socialist project by unmooring it from its Marxist baggage, Robinson’s claim was ‘an unwavering act of faith in the ability and role of ordinary women and men to make their society anew’ (p. ix, notes omitted). While this may clarify Robinson’s purpose, it raises the question of how his analysis should be treated in our current moment in which Marxist critique has regained its relevance.

That said, one means of engaging Robinson’s Anthropology is to understand it through the same modes of Marxist analysis it critiques. While Anthropology decries dialectical materialism as bourgeois intellectual arrogance that deprived socialism of its original promise, ironically Anthropology can be interpreted as presenting an extraordinarily innovative dialectic in its own right. Here, if socialism, i.e. spiritual anti-hierarchical medieval communalism, was a ‘thesis’ that found its ‘antithesis’ in the individualistic rationality of the bourgeois Enlightenment, then Marxism can be understood as a ‘synthesis’ of the socialist ethic with Enlightenment analytical methods.

This interpretation is supported by William Robert’s recent contextualisation of Capital within the workers’ movement of Marx’s time, which shows how Marx’s theory stemmed from claims that labour’s political goals required a sufficiently radical understanding of its distinct arena of struggle. If the medievally-rooted socialist ethic informed this backdrop of labour activism, then, far from ‘intellectual conceit’, Marx’s mastery over bourgeois theory for the purpose of levying an all-pervasive critique acted to prevent workers’ assertions from being co-opted by ultimately futile capitalist offerings of reform. While this view preserves Robinson’s premise that the existence of socialism is not contingent on the emergence of capitalism, it does add the caveat that perhaps socialism, at least in Marx’s context, required Marxism to resist capitalism.

Nothing about this interpretation should detract from Robinson’s overarching point that we must decentre the agency of Marx’s privileged white male industrial working class when theorising anti-capitalist resistance. Although the Marxist tradition is certainly not without chauvinism in this regard, it has also been remarkably adaptive to self-critique. A key illustration of this is Onur Ince’s demonstration of how capitalist domination is a globally interconnected force, but its exploitation is experienced (and resisted) in different ways across varying temporal and spatial contexts that include wage labour, involuntary servitude and colonial dispossession. In taking this multi-layered perspective to the next level, Anthropology shows how postcolonial/decolonial critiques of Marxist orthodoxies regarding the non-European world also apply to Europe itself.

Beyond its analytical value, Robinson’s account holds great potential as a tool of political praxis. For what Anthropology confronts is the question of how exactly are we to make sense of the cultural and political significance of Europe’s medieval period in our current global moment? Especially in Europe and settler offshoots, this historical period is susceptible to being problematically invoked by both the liberal centre and the far right. For liberal centrists, this era can be characterised as an alleged ‘dark age’ of ignorant barbarism, and the fact that it was transcended justifies the narrative of linear progress. For the far right, this era acts as an alleged ‘golden age’ of pure white Christian identity that justifies the resurrection of violent, and potentially genocidal, fascism. Both of these narratives mischaracterise the material dynamics of the current global crisis and, in varying capacities, both are rooted in the belief in Western superiority over all other peoples. Through Robinson’s account, we are provided with a third option for understanding the contemporary meaning of Europe’s middle ages: a legacy of ordinary people struggling for emancipation against unjust material conditions. Thus, paradoxically, Anthropology’s relentless critique of Marxism offers great potential in forging an entirely new dimension of Marxist strategy in the actually-existing world.

Eric Loefflad is a PhD candidate in Law at the University of Kent, Canterbury. His current research focuses on the intertwined material histories of law, empire and the emergence of modern political consciousness.

]]>https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/an-anthropology-of-marxism/feed/167249Tactical voting in the EP elections: different regions call for different strategies – and efforts may still backfirehttps://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/ep-elections-tactical-voting/
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/ep-elections-tactical-voting/#commentsThu, 16 May 2019 23:00:21 +0000https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/?p=67236

Heinz Brandenburg explains that due to the electoral system used in the European Parliament elections, and in the absence of any coordination between the relevant parties, pro-Remain voters are facing a tricky task when looking for ways to vote tactically. Importantly, they would be ill-advised to apply identical tactics across the various regions.

The European Parliament (EP) Elections in the UK on 23 May will be different from any previous ones, and not just because they were not supposed to take place at all. In contrast to previous EP elections, these are actually generating interest – because of Brexit, the Brexit Party, the multitude of “Remain” parties, the expected punishment for both the governing and the main opposition party, and plenty of other sub-plots.

What they are also generating is a sudden interest in how EP elections are actually conducted, and how votes are translated into seats. This is primarily because three Remain parties are contesting these elections separately and competing with each other (Liberal Democrats, Greens, Change UK/The Independent Group). So, while the Brexit Party appears to be attracting most of the hard Brexit vote, the pro-Remain vote – which is probably equally big – could be split three ways, or even four, given that some Remainers may stick with Labour despite their equivocation around a second referendum question.

So far, at best, people may have been aware that in EP elections a proportional system is used, and not the first-past-the-post (FPTP) system as in general elections. Because of this, we suddenly hear the name d’Hondt bandied about in the British media. D’Hondt is one of the available methods of allocating seats in multi-member districts, and is the method in use for the European elections in the eleven electoral regions of Great Britain (not in Northern Ireland).

Table 1 illustrates how d’Hondt works, with the example of South West England, a six-seater electoral region in the 2014 EP election: each party’s total votes are listed in the first row, while the further rows display votes divided by two, three, four and so on. After identifying the six highest numbers in the spreadsheet, each gets a seat allocated. Note from the example that the Liberal Democrats, even though their vote share was not far off the Greens, would not have won a seat if seven had been on offer, as UKIP would have edged them to win their third seat.

But d’Hondt is not really what creates disproportionality – that is instead brought about by relatively small district magnitudes. The term district magnitude describes the number of seats in an electoral district. In FPTP, district magnitude is one and results are least proportional. The eleven EP election regions in Great Britain allocate between three and ten seats, which means district magnitude ranges between three and ten. And that is where things become disproportional. If Britain used the same system as, for example, Germany, with no subdivision into regions, just allocating its 70 seats according to national vote shares, the d’Hondt system would create an almost perfectly proportional outcome. And the important point is that EP elections in the Britain not only use a somewhat disproportional system, but that the system is differently disproportional across British regions.

With decreasing district magnitude, electoral thresholds emerge – i.e. parties need to win an increasing share of votes in order to convert these into at least one seat. Figure 1 reports how over the past four EP elections, since PR was introduced in 1999, required vote shares vary across electoral regions, depending on the number of seats on offer. Competing in North East England (three seats), a party typically needs to win over 15% of the votes to convert into one seat and over 30% to win two seats. Whereas in South East England (ten seats), 8% tends to be easily enough to win a seat, 15% sufficient to win two.

Note: Data points show the lowest vote share ever recorded for a party winning one (black dots) or two seats (blue dots) across EP elections 1999-2014, and the highest ever vote share recorded for a party that failed to win a seat (red dots) or failed to win more than one seat (pink dots). The added yellow line shows the effective threshold by district magnitude as proposed by Arend Lijphart (eff thresh = 75% [m+1]), illustrating the fit with empirical data from EP elections in the UK.

This means that parties face vastly different competitive situations across electoral regions, and also voters face different situations – lower district magnitude would require more tactical voting in order to make votes count. However, given the low salience of EP elections and knowledge about them, British voters have shown no signs of adapting to the varying electoral contexts. This is illustrated in Figure 2 which reports how fragmented election results were across regions with varying district magnitude. It uses the measure of “effective number of electoral parties” which helps to measure fragmentation of the party system. Basically, if half of the voters vote for party A and the other half for party B, we have a perfect two-party system (ENEP=2), whereas if five different parties receive the votes of a fifth of the electorate each, we would have a perfect five-party system (ENEP=5). Figure 2 shows that fragmentation varies systematically between EP elections but does not respond to changing district magnitude.

For comparison, I added ENEP scores for the EP elections before 1999 when FPTP was still used, as well as for general elections after 1999 – on the left side, at district magnitude of 1. (These are obviously not directly comparable, as ENEP in earlier EP and later general elections are measured for the entire country, whereas those for EP 1999-2014 at the level of electoral regions. These are only meant for general comparison of how voting varies between FPTP and PR elections.) Here we do see that voters behave differently under PR than under in FPTP – more votes go to smaller parties. But voters in EP elections behave as if elections were equally PR across all regions – voters in NE England or Wales are just as likely to choose from a wide range of parties as those in London or SE England, despite small parties having a much lower chance of gaining seats.

What happened in 2014 gives us some idea of the challenge faced by pro-Remain parties and voters in the upcoming EP elections: two of the three now competing pro-Remain parties, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens, suffered badly in 2014 from voters behaving almost identically across very different electoral contexts. Between them, the two parties won over 2.2 million votes (13.4%) but only four seats (5.5%). Three of their four seats were won in London and South East England where both parties polled close to their national average. The only exceptional performance came in SW England, where both achieved over 10% – enough for the Greens to win a seat but not the Liberal Democrats.

In total, two-thirds of their 2.2 million votes were “wasted”, in the sense of being cast in regions where no seats were won. In total, Liberal Democrats and Greens contributed 1.5m or 62% of all “wasted votes” across Britain (see Figure 3). However, only in the three regions with the smallest district magnitude (NE England, Wales and East Midlands) was their combined vote share below the effective threshold.

For the current contest, a recent FT analysis of regional breakdowns projects the three English pro-Remain parties to convert their combined 27% or so into only nine seats (12.8%), while the Brexit Party is looking at converting just under 30% of votes into 29 seats (41.4%). The latter is doing so well because it polls at well over 30% everywhere outside Scotland, Wales and London and hence is on course to win multiple seats in all of those regions.

The general urge among pro-Remain voters is probably to agree on one of the pro-Remain parties at the expense of the two others, but however hard they may try, without party agreements and more central coordination this will remain quite haphazard. While an actual electoral pact might have maximised returns, some half-hearted concentration of votes in favour of one party would create sub-optimal outcomes in regions with low as well as in regions with high district magnitude.

Tactical voting will fail in NE England or Wales because any such haphazard effort will not be sufficient to get that one party over the required threshold of 15% or more. It could be most successful across regions with district magnitude of 5-7, if it helps getting at least one party over the threshold of 10-12%. However, in London, NW England or SE England (with eight or more seats), it could actually reduce the overall number of seats the three pro-Remain parties could win between them. If, for example, tactical voting pushes one pro-Remain party close to 15% but reduces the two others to 5 or 6%, the bigger party will not have enough to win multiple seats (look again at Figure 1 and the threshold for winning more than one seat) while the others could both fail to win a single seat. That could reduce the pro-Remain parties to a single seat where three could have been won.

Where the effective threshold is well below 10% (London, SE England, NW England), the best outcome for pro-Remain parties would actually be for the vote to be as evenly split between them as possible.

]]>https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/ep-elections-tactical-voting/feed/267236Gender and the ‘impact’ agenda: the costs of public engagement to female academicshttps://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/gender-and-impact-in-academia/
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/gender-and-impact-in-academia/#commentsWed, 15 May 2019 23:00:06 +0000https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/?p=67225

Engaging in public discussion is a crucial aspect of academia. At the same time, female academics often encounter sexist abuse as a result of such engagement. Heather Savigny draws on interview data to argue that while women may seek to actively build impact and public engagement in to their research agendas, the site of interaction between media and academia is gendered and raced.

In 2014 I was interviewed for the Independent on Sunday about a paper I published on women’s experiences of sexism in academia. The interview, I was advised, would be another excellent dimension to my ‘impact case study’. Here was an example of ‘public engagement’ and the kind of thing that the Research Excellence Framework (REF) agenda is seeking to foster.

Shortly after that interview I received an email telling me that I had been awarded ‘whiny feminist of the month’. The man who had sent this email blind copied in some of my senior male colleagues. His email and publicly available blogpost were clearly designed to humiliate and potentially silence me. (Although I was reassured I was in excellent company: Harriet Harman, Laura Bates, Jo Swinson, Caroline Criado Perez have also been ‘recipients’).

Reflecting on this experience led to a discussion as to whether this constituted ‘impact’ in relation to the requirements of the REF. The institutional response was no. Which in turn got me thinking about what it is that counts as impact. Is it only something that leads to positive change? And what about the negative consequences of engaging in impact and public engagement strategies? Do these not ‘count’, especially knowing women are more likely to be subject to online abuse?

These questions led me to think about the extent to which the REF Impact policy itself is situated in a gendered context. We know that women are under-represented in the academy, with fewer than 25 of out of over 19,000 professors are BAME women. Women are more likely to be negatively evaluated by students; while at the same time be expected to provide greater levels of pastoral care. Women are more likely to have their work devalued; be under-represented at conferences; and less likely to be cited. A key component of feminist theorizing is drawing on the lived experiences of women to expose the ways in which power structures work. And so in my recent paper, I drew on academic women’s experiences to understand whether, and if so, how, public engagement and the impact agenda are gendered.

I ran a survey and a number of in-depth interviews with women academics – from Russell Group to post-1992 institutions, and from science, social science, and arts and humanities asking women what happened when they engaged in the Impact/Public Engagement agenda. What my interviews exposed was a problematic reinforcement of structural failings reinforced through cultural sexism. Cultural sexism is the part where structures fail; where sexism seeps through into our norms and values, to undermine the functions of structures. For example, despite Equal Opportunities legislation and the Equal Pay Act, women are still under-represented at senior level and paid less across academia. These structures are clearly not functioning as intended; undermined I suggest through a cultural context in which sexism (and racism) are reinforced through the lived experiences of isolation, abuse, harassment and silencing. This then translates into a legitimation of structural and symbolic violence towards women: that they are invisible or marginalised becomes ‘just the way things are’ and ‘to be expected’.

We know that women are more likely to be subject to threats of overt physical violence and abuse in the online world and this was reinforced through my respondents’ experiences of physical threats and abuse. Women also described how they had changed research trajectories as a result of abuse. They also talked of how they had taken a conscious decision not to engage with media for fear of abuse. This silencing becomes a form of symbolic violence; an expression of underlying relations of oppression and domination, which as Bourdieu suggests, becomes so normalized and routine that it occurs almost with the subordinate’s own complicity.

Women then are structurally positioned to be complicit in their own silencing. My interviewees were consciously aware of the importance of having a social media presence in developing their careers, for promoting their research, and in that ‘all important job market’. Yet, one of the things that surprised and then shocked me was the number of women who said they didn’t use social media at all as they had seen what happened to women who did, and felt it was worth the potential distress and damage to their health. These women were silenced before they had even spoken.

Of course this silencing has further potential consequences for women’s academic careers: low profile research activity when many are tweeting about their latest paper for citations and improving their ‘h-index’ score, and lack of connection with networks means that women are subject to a double bind of silencing and invisibility in the job market. Being absent in social media debate has the potential to women being absent in opportunities for recruitment.

Some women did speak however of feeling empowered through their experiences on social media, as a consequence of solidarity and connectivity. Senior figures in the field had offered support to junior scholars who had been subject to abuse. One of the interviewees told me about how she struggled – her whole raison d’etre as an academic was public engagement but the costs were not always easy to bear. Women repeatedly expressed their frustration with the extra, unrecognized emotional labour that was a feature of their working lives (although it should be noted, that this is not solely in relation to media engagement).

The emotional labour and costs to a diversity of female academics needs to be factored in to policy decisions both at the level of the REF and in universities and departments. When women are silenced and marginalised, and structural inequalities reinforced, this takes the form of symbolic violence which becomes routinised structurally. To challenge and dismantle this, universities need to take their responsibilities to protect and support their staff with adequate training, policies, and procedures. And it is important for all of us in academia to show solidarity with our female colleagues, to call out the behaviours that silence and marginalize a diversity of women – be that online or in the workplace.

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Note: the above draws on the author’s published work in the Political Studies Review.

About the Author

Heather Savigny is Professor of Gender, Media and Politics at De Montfort University.

All articles posted on this blog give the views of the author(s), and not the position of LSE British Politics and Policy, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.Featured image credit: Pixabay (Public Domain).

]]>https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/gender-and-impact-in-academia/feed/567225Corbyn’s Labour agenda has more in common with its forbears than is often assumedhttps://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/corbyns-labour-agenda/
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/corbyns-labour-agenda/#commentsTue, 14 May 2019 23:00:57 +0000https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/?p=67212

There are widespread claims that Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party has entailed a shift to a more ‘radical’ and ‘left-wing’ form of politics. Yet, many of these claims are untested or lack clear empirical evidence. Rob Manwaring contextualises Labour’s policy agenda by focussing on the 2017 Labour Manifesto. He explains how the wider claims about Corbyn’s radicalism tend to mask some long-standing continuity in the Labour tradition, and simplify a more complex policy agenda.

British politics is, somewhat inevitably, dominated by the politics of Brexit. The 2016 referendum result has triggered a significant realignment of British politics and the party system. Whilst we should be circumspect about reading too much into the longer-term meaning of the European elections, recent polling suggests a significant shift against the two key major parties. One key issue is that the sheer dominance of the Brexit means that attention shifts away from other significant changes (and also continuities). In terms of the Labour party under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, much of the current media scrutiny is on its position on leaving the European Union. Yet, this narrow focus, whilst clearly important, means that we have not fully understood how Labour has been changing under Corbyn.

In recent research, my colleague Evan Smith and I, examine Labour’s policy agenda under Corbyn. To do this, we focussed on Labour’s most recent election manifesto, ‘For the Many, Not the Few’, which outlined Labour’s policy agenda at the 2017 General Election. Using both quantitative and qualitative analysis, we wanted to put Corbyn’s agenda in context, and also better understand how Labour has changed and, crucially, what has remained the same.

To do this, we compared ‘For the Many’ with every Labour manifesto since 1945 (20 manifestos in total), using the Manifesto Research of Political Representation (MARPOR) database. The MARPOR database is the longest running dataset in political science, and rests on the salience view of voting, in that parties will give salience and preference to different policy issues at each election to win votes. The MARPOR data enables a comparative view to see how a party changes its policy agenda. For example, it is relatively straightforward to see how much space in the manifestos is given to an issue, such as support for nationalisation. We can then note how, over time, support for this issue can wax and wane. We then supplemented the quantitative comparison by examining it in more detail with four key ‘signature’ Labour manifestos. So, we give a qualitative comparison of how the 2017 manifesto compared against Ed Miliband’s 2015 manifesto, New Labour’s first (1997), the ‘longest political suicide note’ manifesto of 1983, and also the first of the 1974 manifestos.

Before giving a snapshot of some of our findings, we note two key issues in the understanding, and indeed, misunderstanding of Corbyn Labour’s policy. First, we looked at some of the press coverage of ‘For the Many’. We found that the press coverage of the manifesto in May and June was dominated by the language socialism. In nearly 4,000 articles in the mainstream newspapers we found the manifesto linked to terms such as ‘socialist’, ‘radical’ and ‘hard-left’. But, was it? Second, we reviewed much of the recent scholarship on Corbyn. There are a number of important contributions to understanding the rise of Corbyn, and a number of articles and essays seeking to understand his agenda. Yet we find a significant gap in the scholarly knowledge in understanding what Corbyn Labour is setting out to achieve. In our view, the press either mis-understand or wrongly frame Corbyn’s agenda, or in the academic literature we lack a detailed account of his policy agenda. So, what did we find?

In sum, we find both continuity in Corbyn’s agenda with previous Labour manifestos, but also some changes. We also find some clear links with Labour’s policy agenda with the ‘New Labour’ manifestos. In Figure 1, we compared Labour’s score on the MARPOR left/right scale. Basically, the more ‘negative’ the overall coding score the more ‘left-wing’ the manifesto is. Whilst this is something of a crude measure, it does give a useful overview of the manifestos. Clearly, on this measure Labour’s 2017 manifesto is one of the most left-wing of the recent manifestos, and relatively speaking one of the most left overall (7 our of 19 are more ‘left’ than Corbyn’s). Yet, it is not as left-wing as the 1992 manifesto, nor is is it as ‘left’ at the infamous 1983 manifesto. We can also note that all the key new labour manifestos were the most right-wing in Labour’s recent history.

Yet, the left/right scale only gives a rather crude snapshot of the party’s agenda. We then drilled down into specific policy areas and issues to get a better sense of change and continuity in Labour’s policies. On economic issues, we see a more nuanced and complex picture. In Figure 2, we compared Labour’s salience of specific economic policy issues, its support for the free market, its support for market regulation, its preference for planning, and also the support for the mixed economy. We find no mention/support for the free market in ‘For the Many’.

For a social democratic/Labour party this is unsurprising, but it is worth noting that that whilst a mention of this in New Labour’s 1997 and 2001 manifestos this was very small, and indeed no mentions in 2005 New Labour manifesto. Whilst on these measures, Labour’s economic agenda is dominated by a strong focus on market regulation, we can note that this was a far more significant feature of Ed Miliband’s policy agenda. What is clear is that over time, Labour has moved away from a focus on using the instruments of economic planning to shape its agenda, and somewhat ironically we see slightly greater coverage of this issue in the latter New Labour manifestos. Corbyn’s apparent radicalism in this sense did not hark back to the 1970-1980 manifestos.

On a set of different economic measures, we do get a much stronger sense of what was different about Corbyn’s economic agenda. Figure 3 outlines four other indices (support for protectionist policies, support for Keynesian demand management, preference for a greater control of the economy, and support for nationalisation). Here, the great difference in Corbyn’s agenda is apparent, and what in our view fuelled the media framing of Corbyn’s agenda as ‘socialist’ – the focus on nationalisation. This by far, dominated ‘For the Many’, and the nearest comparison for similar levels of coverage was the 1983 manifesto. Nationalisation as a policy issue is almost non existent in Labour’s manifestos from 2001-2015. Yet, whilst on this issue Corbyn’s agenda does have more in common with the mid-late 70s and early 1980s Labour, it is striking how on Corbyn’s Labour gives little to no salience of a more Keynesian approach.

In the rest of the article, we examine and compare Corbyn’s agenda across a wider range of policy issues, including foreign policy, welfare, and support for specific population groups. Again, we find a complex story, and one that is under-appreciated. To a large extent, and in common with some commentators, in more recent times the policy renewal under Ed Miliband has been far more dramatic than Jeremy Corbyn’s. With some policy exceptions, Corbyn’s social democracy has a good deal in common with its historical forbears, and more in common with New Labour, than is sometimes supposed.

Rob Manwaring is Senior Lecturer in the College of Business, Law and Government at Flinders University.

All articles posted on this blog give the views of the author(s), and not the position of LSE British Politics and Policy, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.Featured image credit:Jenny Goodfellow, licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Did reforms introduced in the late 1970s lead to the demise of the Westminster administrative tradition, as it is often argued? Christopher A. Cooper focuses on an important tenet of this tradition: the permanency of civil servants. He argues that reforms better reflect a pattern of institutional layering on top of the Westminster tradition, rather than constituting its demise.

May 3, 1979, is seen by many as a solemn day in Britain’s administrative history. Believing that senior bureaucrats were more concerned with maximizing their department’s budget than with accomplishing the government’s policy agenda, newly empowered Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher introduced a series of reforms to control the bureaucracy and ensure that administration was subordinate to politics. Many political pundits and scholars have interpreted these actions as constituting the death of the Westminster administrative tradition in Britain.

But how accurate is this common understanding of Britain’s administrative history? Did the reforms introduced by control-obsessed governments really bring about the Westminster administrative tradition’s demise? Have the tradition’s tenets of merit recruitment, permanent positions, and anonymity disappeared from Whitehall?

One cannot be blamed for being somewhat sceptical. Bureaucracies are notoriously rigid. They are large, hierarchical, and rule bound, all of which makes them resistant to change. Tony Blair’s memoir is rife with frustration of bureaucrats who embody the classic Westminster administrative tradition. Although he became Prime Minister almost 20 years after Thatcher first introduced her reforms, Blair claimed that “The Sir Humphrey character in the TV series, Yes, Prime Minister was a parody and a fiction, but he was the closest parody could come to fact”. Sir Humphrey Appleby, after all, was persistent in his efforts to resist and thwart any attempt to reduce his bureaucracy’s power: “if the right people don’t have power, do you know what happens? The wrong people get it: politicians, councillors, ordinary voters!”

Measuring the tradition’s vitality: permanent secretaries

The vitality of the Westminster tradition over the last several decades can be better judged by measuring its particular tenets over time. One essential component believed to have been targeted by reform-minded governments is the permanency of senior bureaucrats.

While the tenet of permanency holds that the careers of civil servants are isolated from political influence, and unaffected by transitions in government, many scholars suggest that since the 1980s there has been an increased politicization of bureaucratic appointments, especially when a new government is elected. This politicization is because each government wants individuals to be committed to its policy agenda, and is not the same thing as partisan patronage, typically associated with a spoils system, where governments use public offices to reward party supporters. In her memoir, Thatcher stated that when appointing permanent secretaries she was not interested in whether the individual was loyal to her party. Rather, what she wanted was someone who was “one of us” – committed to her policy agenda – and that:

It became clear to me that it was only by encouraging or appointing individuals, rather than trying to change attitudes en bloc, that progress would be made. And that was to be the method employed.

The vitality of the Westminster tradition can be investigated by examining the permanency of permanent secretaries over the last several decades. To do this, I measured year-over-year turnover of permanent secretaries in each ministry between 1949 and 2014. If control obsessed governments have increasingly politicized the appointment of bureaucratic appointments, we should see a larger rise in turnover among senior bureaucrats following a change in government in the contemporary period.

I therefore examine the relationship between bureaucratic turnover and three political events that are believed to push governments to appoint senior bureaucrats. Specifically, a change in the governing party, a change in prime minister when the party stays the same, and the re-election of government. I examined the relationship these political variables have with bureaucratic turnover in years between the 1949 and 1978 and again in years between 1979 and 2014, and also controlled for additional factors possibly affecting turnover such as the length of time the permanent secretary has been in their position and the political party in power.

Figure 1 displays the predicted probability of turnover in the two years following each political event during these two periods.

The results show that the permanency of permanent secretaries has not been increasingly politicized since 1979. A change in party, a new prime minister, and the re-election of a government lead to a rise in bureaucratic turnover in the contemporary period as much as they did in the first three decades following the end of the Second World War. Claims that power-hungry governments since the late 1970s have brought forth the demise of the Westminster administrative tradition, do not accurately describe the permanency of Britain’s most senior bureaucrats. This does not mean that bureaucratic turnover is unaffected by politics in the contemporary period, but rather, that in contrast to claims frequently made: the politics of bureaucratic turnover has not intensified.

What does this mean for Britain?

Almost 170 years ago the Northcote-Trevelyan Report hailed the merits of a civil service staffed by a body of permanent officials. While observers from many countries around the world have expressed concern over what appears to be an increasing politicization of the bureaucracy, including other Westminster countries, the findings of this study bring some much-needed good news. The title of Britain’s most senior administrative officials continues to accurately describe them: permanent secretaries.

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Note: the above draws on the author’s published work in British Politics.

About the Author

Christopher A. Cooper is an Assistant Professor in Public Management in the School of Political Studies at the University of Ottawa.

All articles posted on this blog give the views of the author(s), and not the position of LSE British Politics and Policy, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.Featured image credit: Wikimedia/Fair use.